When we published Viato it was always our intention to make this a multilingual font family, suitable for corporate usage. The fonts have now been updated to include support for Greek and Cyrillic. As with InterFace it is still possible to buy individual language products, and users who have bought Viato in the past will find that their font has not changed. Existing Viato users will receive a separate email invite to upgrade their product with additional language support.

With Stroudley we created a font family that is ideally suited for signage purposes and general transport design. The font's generous x-height guarantees optimum legibility despite the condensed character widths. Many long place names can be set comfortably within standard width and height signs, for example in train stations. At small sizes the fonts perform well within an information environment such as timetables. Again, the nature of the design allows for maximum information to be placed in minimum space. Some of the weights in this font family are already in use on the Southern Railway here in the UK. We are of the opinion that they function exceptionally well.

Both Viato and Stroudley are available to buy online for per-user licensing. Contact us for details of volume licensing, modification and OEM pricing.

Caslon is one of the classic fonts. Even in the days of industrial metal type, font foundries attempted to create their interpretations of it. With the advent of digital fonts for Mac and PC, even more versions have appeared. Many of them have their roots in one of the hot metal variants.

The identity of King's College London uses Caslon 540 predominantly in all body copy and headline environments. While the font works fine in headlines and display it tends to become anaemic at 9pt, the size used for body copy. It was for this reason that the College approached Dalton Maag to create a font that met their needs for an elegant display and a functional body style.

To create something unique for our client we decided to research the specimens by William Caslon. We compared these with contemporary designs and then started to draw our interpretation of this beautiful typeface. The display version was first to be worked on as it dictated the look and feel. Never to be used at small sizes, the font has a high contrast in the stems and hairlines, and serifs are rounded to provide elegance. The text version is geared to functionality; serifs are cut square and contrast is reduced to ensure good legibility and integrity of drawing. The text fonts are also differently proportioned to allow for their small size usage.

In all, this new font – the King's Caslon – is now a family of two display styles, Regular and Italic, and four text styles, Regular, Semibold and their Italics. The character sets are expanded to Dalton Maag's Typo set, allowing the College's users to produce typography that is of the highest standard.

King's Caslon will be coming to the Dalton Maag Exclusives retail library later this year with user licences available to purchase online, OEM licensing and volume licensing available. We plan to make a few changes from the version we've developed for King's College, such as the addition of historic ligatures and a weight change from semibold to bold. We'll keep you updated on when this exciting revival will be available to all.

Applications and Operating Systems often use cache lists and files to speed up loading and accessing of documents, or to store user settings. They are not unlike Cookie files that websites leave behind. One such file is called 'AdobeFnt.lst', which is created by Adobe applications and stores a list of the fonts that are available. The information contains font name and font style, and its location on the system. This will aid the program to start up quicker as all this information does not have to be processed from the font.

We have found that every so often it is necessary to delete the 'AdobeFnt.lst' file, forcing applications to rebuild it afresh. Only then can you guarantee that the data contained is up to date and actually reflects the fonts that you have on your system. As font designers we often update fonts using the same font name, causing a mismatch - we have seen everything, from characters not being available - even though they are present in the font – to kern pairs missing, even though we added them. Deleting the cache file almost always cures this problem. You may also find that font formats don't update correctly. If PostScript fonts are replaced with OpenType, for example, documents may not correctly identify the fonts. Again, deleting the cache file helps.

It is also worth, in Mac OS X, to clear the Font Cache every once in a while. There are a number of free utilities that can be found by searching for 'Font Cache'. These enable you to clear the Font Cache safely, ensuring a smooth running of the fonts.

We at Dalton Maag clear the AdobeFnt files and Font Cache with almost religious regularity. It is also one of the first suggestions we give to a client who contacts us with font issues, and nine times out of ten, that was all they needed to do to solve their problem. Whilst the AdobeFnt data can be present on both Windows and Macintosh, the Font Cache is clearly a Mac OSX issue.